


i will get you next time, Gadget

by misura



Category: Soon I Will Be Invincible - Austin Grossman
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Closeted Character, Multi, POV First Person, Unreliable Narrator, With A Twist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-08 12:52:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5497703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misura/pseuds/misura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Second and third chances, and also a scene with penguins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i will get you next time, Gadget

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silk_knickers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silk_knickers/gifts).



> tags are great, but I feel like none of them _quite_ cover what I want to say about this fic before you read it so ...
> 
> this fic is tagged Multi for referencing both het and slash relationships. however,I have only tagged for the relationship that is shown 'on-screen' as being resolved and requited. all other relationships are either one-sided or left unresolved by the end of the fic.
> 
> you wrote a lovely, kind, encouraging letter, and I wrote, well, this, by way of a Yuletide treat. I very much hope that you will enjoy it.

Something you should know about supervillains by now: we don't do anything by half.

When I come out to the world as bisexual, I do it on TV, with viewers in one-hundred-twenty-seven countries tuned in. They expect to see a speech by a member of the Worldcourt about the state of the global economy; instead, they get me.

Half a minute into my speech, the number of people watching has quintupled. Ten years ago, at various TV stations, people would be pulling the plug now, as I explain who I am and why I am doing this.

Ten years ago, this speech would end with my getting beaten up on live TV, or at least beating a dignified but hasty retreat as the New Champions or the New Super Squadron or whoever is available right now storm the studio.

This is not ten years ago. This is today.

Nobody tries to stop me as I walk out of the studio. Nobody is waiting for me outside, or, if they are, they are being very discreet about it. Right now, I don't really care which of the two it is.

 

I was there when Erica won her first Pullitzer.

The story she'd won it for wasn't really _mine_ \- it was an article about CoreFire, of course. Some weeks, when there were a lot of things going wrong, he seemed to be the only topic she wrote about. Given that I was his nemesis, though, I still felt I deserved enough of the credit to deserve to join in the festivities. Besides, it had been a long time since I'd last kidnapped her.

At this point, I had mostly come to terms with Erica having more of an interest in CoreFire than she would ever have in me. I no longer begrudged Jason the fact that wherever he went, there was Erica to get a snappy quote and a few pictures. He was very photogenic, and he always knew what to say. People _liked_ seeing him on the frontpage of their morning paper. Newspapers, therefore, liked to put him there. It was all very simple, a mere matter of economics.

"I hadn't expected to see you here."

I was dressed like a perfectly ordinary citizen. She probably thought that I was simply there as an old friend, someone who knew someone who knew someone who had managed to put me on the guest list. (The truth, naturally, was that I wasn't on any guest list. I'd just slipped inside while I was invisible and changed into something a bit more suitable for the occasion in the men's room.)

"Well," I said, "it's not every day that one of my old school friends wins a Pullitzer."

She looked away. "If you're going to do anything, would you mind doing it _after_ my speech? I worked on it for several hours. I think it's rather good."

I decided that there was no way she could know who I really was. "What do you mean?" In hindsight, perhaps that was a mistake.

"Nothing," she said. "Forget it."

(The evening ended, of course, with CoreFire crashing in through the window, still clutching both Red Rover Reddington and the Flying Fiend. She was halfway through her speech at that point.)

(A mere two days later, she interviewed him in the Parisian sewers, after defeating Louis Lapole. So I guess she wasn't that upset about him not letting her finish.)

 

Of course, you could claim that I'm not really bisexual.

In my life, I've fallen in love with two people so far, and both of them were female. (They were also, as it turned out, the same person. Does that make my track record more convincing, or less? I don't know.)

And then there is CoreFire. Jason.

No love lost there, obviously. Still, you have to wonder sometimes (or I have, anyway): could we ever have been friends? Could Doctor Impossible have joined the New Champions without brainwashing them first? Could CoreFire have turned to a life of crime of his own volition? Could we, somehow, impossibly, have both stayed the people we were in high school?

I'm his arch nemesis. We never teamed up - like Astra and Spitfire did, against the Catagenic Cloud, or the Infanta Terribla and Mr Terrific, when the Infanta's mother sent the Army of Ghosts to drag her home. CoreFire's only vulnerability was iridium; he never faced an enemy that he couldn't handle by himself, without needing any help from someone who would rather help him than see him get killed or destroyed by someone else. (Or, in Astra's case, forced to marry a planet and become its new moon. Don't ask me how that would have worked; I never heard that part of the story.)

People say sometimes that there's a thin line between love and hate, and maybe that's true.

Just because it's a thin line, that doesn't mean it's not there, though, or that I don't know exactly where it is. I know exactly where the line is, and on which side of it I am, where Jason is concerned.

I am, after all, the smartest man in the world.

 

And then there was Lily. The mysterious, see-through woman from the future - except, of course, that she wasn't from the future at all, and in the end, I guess the 'see-through' part only went skin deep. So to speak. I never quite understood her. I don't think anyone else did, either.

In my book, that gave us something in common, besides a taste for the villain way of life. After all, there weren't a great many people who understood _me_ , either.

"You don't feel threatened by me at all, do you?" she asked me once. We were not yet dating at the time, although we'd worked together a few times without double-crossing each other. Among villains, that practically made us friends.

"I probably would, if you threatened me," I said. Mere hours ago, I had put into motion a plan to turn the Moon to a cheese-like substance. In other words, I was feeling pretty good about myself.

I hadn't fallen in love with her - not yet, anyway. That would only come after my Pyramid scheme, foiled only by the Fabulous Fivesome teaming up with the Sphinx _and_ two members of the Champions who were there on vacation. Lily got there just in time to turn the tide, enabling me to leave with not only my dignity but also most of my equipment intact.

She chuckled a little. "I think I like that about you."

"My sense of humor?" Erica had laughed at my jokes. Jason usually didn't get them.

"The fact that you don't need to be the toughest guy in the room," she said.

I had a freeze ray pointed at where she was sitting. One push of a button would fill the room with knock-out gas. (I had taken an antidote before entering.) I had the latest version of the Impossiblerator securely tucked away in my belt.

From where I was sitting, I might not be the toughest guy in the room, but if she wanted to start any trouble, I saw no reason to assume that it wouldn't be me who'd come out on top in the end.

I shrugged. "We're on the same side, aren't we?"

(Now that I think about it, she never did answer that. Coincidence? Maybe. In this line of work, after a while you have to start reminding yourself that just because everyone's out to get you, that doesn't mean you should become paranoid.)

 

"How did you figure it out?"

Taken out of context, this question might be the lead-in to a sincere heart-to-heart. Given that it's asked by someone who has spent the past five minutes destroying my laboratory, I know better.

I wonder if he knows about Lily. About Erica. I wonder what she meant to him, or still means to him.

"I asked you a question." 

It's hardly the first time someone's come in and forcibly rearranged my furniture and equipment. You get used to it, and after a while, you find yourself anticipating it, slipping in a few little surprises here and there for the next person to flip over your couch.

I shrug. In some ways, we've had this conversation a hundred times already. Where's the button that will cause the jelly ray to self-destruct? What's the code to stop the rocket from launching?

How did I figure out that the guy who pretends he doesn't even remember my name actually has had a crush on me since - well, possibly since we first met?

 

I used to spend a lot more time kidnapping people.

By the time the cavalry came riding in, the hostage would be securely tied up, of course - to the doomsday device, safely out of reach of the self-destruct button, or just to a convenient pillar.

What they never show you is that, well, it takes time for the heroes to get there. You can't keep the hostage tied up all that time; they'd probably faint from hunger or exhaustion, and anyway, I'm a supervillain, not a monster.

So when I say that I used to spend a lot more time kidnapping people, what I'm saying is that I spent a lot more time talking to people. Showing them around my secret base for a bit. Inviting their opinion on the wallpaper, or the kitchen design. From time to time, I would even tell them my masterplan. Why not? It wasn't as if they were going to stop me. They knew their role, and generally, they stuck to it.

Erica has probably seen more of my bases than any other non-hero.

Once, she told me she liked penguins. Thus, I built my next base under Antarctica. It wasn't easy, but, well, 'easy' isn't really in the job description.

We had breakfast in the observation room. I told her about the intelligence of penguins and their potential to be turned into an army of small, slippery soldiers; she humored me by not outright telling me that I was making it all up and told me about her latest series of articles.

Their subject? Your guess is probably as accurate as mine.

"There are other superheroes out there, you know," I said. I tried to sound like I was just teasing her a little, like it didn't actually matter to me who she wrote her stories about.

"I'm not sure if you're in any position to throw rocks." Her expression told me that she was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the coffee. I felt a little hurt. "You and CoreFire - well, you're kind of obsessed with each other, aren't you?"

It's always a little awkward when the woman you love tells you that you're 'kind of obsessed' with another person. Gender has nothing to do with it - why should it? It's about emotions, feelings.

"True, my life would be quite a bit easier if he didn't exist," I said. It didn't seem polite to say that I wanted to kill him.

"He talks about you." Outside, the penguins were waking up. Erica watched them while she sipped her coffee. I wondered if she realized that this entire room had been built only for her. "Rather a lot."

Did he also talk about, well, the other me? The me he had known once? I didn't ask. It didn't matter.

Erica finished her coffee. I snapped my fingers, to call over one of the penguin waiters. I got the idea for them from _Mary Poppins_ but, of course, I had no intention of admitting this to anyone.

 

CoreFire - Jason leaves in a huff. I guess that we are never going to be the kind of people who have heart-to-hearts. I'm not sure if that's what I want us to be, anyway.

Redemption arcs have never been my style. I'm not ashamed of what I am. True, I may regret some of my choices, but who doesn't? Who has never looked back on any event and wished that they had done or said something other than what they did or said?

You make the choices you make, and once you've made them, you have to live with them.

At least until someone steps up and shows you that maybe the world isn't quite as scary and unaccepting as you think it is.

 

"Why?" Damsel asks. "Why now? Why that way?"

I have been invited to visit the New Champions in their headquarters. I can tell that they've recently redecorated the place.

Blackwolf is there, and Feral. Elphin is watching me like she'd prefer stabbing me. Mr Mystic is probably hiding behind a curtain somewhere. I see no CoreFire, and no Fatale. No Lily. I wonder if the team is falling apart again, if this conversation is, in some way, an interview. Probably not.

I wonder if CoreFire has told them his big secret (again: probably not) or if any of them sussed it out from my speech ( _definitely_ not; I was very careful in what I did and didn't say about my past. Jason got the message, as witnessed by his earlier visit, but everybody else probably just thinks I'm trying to gain something. Of course, they're not wrong.) 

"Maybe I was just making a statement," I say. "Maybe it was part of a plan. Maybe - "

Feral growls. I am reminded that I came here mostly unarmed.

"You've got some public support right now, but it's not going to last. The moment you start one of your little plots to take over the world, people will remember who and what you really are," Blackwolf says.

"I have my reasons," I say. "I don't see why I would need to share them with anyone, especially not people who have beaten me up on several occasions."

"We'll find out anyway," Damsel says. "Sooner or later."

"Knock yourselves out," I say. I've seen their file on me. I doubt any of their theories will even come close to the truth. "Now, if that was all, I am a busy man."

Being a villain means you spend a lot of time plotting and planning and building things. Heroes have it easier; they only come in and destroy stuff. No creative process involved at all.

Honestly, I'm not sure that I could stand it.

 

So why did I do it? Was it to show myself that I could? Was it because there's someone out there whom I felt deserved to know the truth? Was it to tell Jason, however indirectly, that other people have feelings, too?

Maybe I did it because I just got tired of having him always come crashing in to destroy my bases. Maybe I did it just to screw with his head, a bit of payback for his faking his own death. Maybe I did it to get the do-gooders of the world off my back for a while. Public image is so important in this business, after all, and at some point, it stopped being 'cool' to beat up other people simply because they were different.

And maybe, just maybe, I did it simply because I finally got over hating him.

 

_epilogue_

They are waiting for me when I get there - 'there' being my newest secret base. I had rather hoped that it would last at least another two months, but sometimes, life happens.

In fact, life happens continuously.

"We're here to talk," Lily says. I try to look at her and see Erica. It bothers me that I can't.

"That's new." I wonder how bad things are inside. There was nothing there that can't be replaced, but some of the posters weren't exactly easy to find.

Jason is wearing what I assume to be his civilian clothes. He looks like a pizza delivery guy.

"Jonathan," he says. His expression tells me that he'd rather be somewhere else. The fact that he's still here tells me - well. Traditionally, only villains get redemption arcs, but I suppose there are always exceptions. The question, of course, is whether or not I want to be a part of _his_.

"Hello, Jason."

The answer is easy.

After all, I am the smartest man in the world.


End file.
